Black Lives Matter leader Cat Brooks playing the role of her life

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Activist Cat Brooks, of Oakland, is photographed near Oakland City Hall in Oakland, Calif., on Wednesday, July 1, 2015. Brooks is the founder of the Anti-Police Terror Project, co-chair of the ONYX Organizing Committee, member of Black Lives Matter Bay Area and one of the Black Friday 14. Brooks has organized several Black Lives Matter and other protests in Oakland. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)

Activist Cat Brooks, of Oakland, is photographed at Snow Park in Oakland, Calif., on Wednesday, July 1, 2015. Brooks is the founder of the Anti-Police Terror Project, co-chair of the ONYX Organizing Committee, member of Black Lives Matter Bay Area and one of the Black Friday 14. Brooks has organized several Black Lives Matter and other protests in Oakland. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)

OAKLAND — Cat Brooks grew up in Las Vegas dreaming of an acting career even as she tagged along with her “radical feminist” mother from one protest to another.

Show business took her all the way to Scotland for a brief role as Lady Macbeth, but Brooks now finds herself on a bigger stage more aligned with her radical roots.

The 39-year-old Oakland resident, who also goes by her given name Sheilagh Polk, has emerged as one of the most prominent organizers in the Black Lives Matter movement. Over the past year, Brooks has played a key role staging protests that halted a San Francisco-bound BART train full of Black Friday shoppers, blockaded Oakland’s police headquarters and helped end Mayor Libby Schaaf’s short-lived effort to crack down on nighttime street marches.

Her confrontational tactics have divided civil rights leaders, and her around-the-clock commitment to the cause hasn’t always sat well with her husband and 9-year-old daughter.

But Brooks, who also runs an East Bay educational advocacy nonprofit, said she can’t slow down at a time when police treatment of African-Americans is generating national outrage and demands for change.

“We can see that what is happening in Oakland, is happening in New York, is happening in Los Angeles,” she said. “And if we are to win, it has to be a national mass movement where there is pressure everywhere all the time.”

The actions organized by Brooks and her associates with groups that include the BlackOUT Collective, ONYX Organizing Committee and the Anti-Police Terror Project, have stood out both for their clear focus and their dramatic flair.

The human chain they formed using tubes to cover their arms stopped the BART train at the West Oakland station for three hours on the day after Thanksgiving — the busiest shopping day of the year.

It was a clear message, Brooks said, that people shouldn’t expect business as usual “while black people are being killed in the street.” Weeks later, the blockade of the Oakland police station was capped off with the unfurling of a “Black Lives Matter” flag above the building.

“It’s some of the best organizing I’ve seen in a long time,” said Wilson Riles, a former Oakland councilman whose daughter has worked with Brooks and other organizers. “I think they have contributed to a huge shift in the public debate in almost every urban area within the country.”

But George Holland, president of the NAACP’s Oakland branch, said actions like the BART takeover were counterproductive. “You’re affecting people who didn’t really have anything to do with the problem,” he said. “People lost their jobs because they were not able to go to work. Is that the kind of effect you want to have?”

Brooks’ activist streak began as a girl in Las Vegas where her white mother took her to anti-nuclear protests and her black father, who had several run-ins with the law, didn’t shy away from discussing the racism he faced.

One night, when Brooks was about 5 years old, she said she was in the car with her father when police pulled him over.

“I remember seeing him get slammed on the front of the car,” she said. “He didn’t get arrested that night, but he came back with a bloody nose.”

Brooks initially focused on acting after college. She got a day job with Creative Artists Agency, one of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies, but left in 2002 to join Community Coalition, a Los Angeles-based racial justice nonprofit.

Brooks focused mostly on educational equality issues but turned her attention to police violence in 2009 after the killing of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer.

“I don’t know what it was, but that shifted something in me,” she said. “It was my ‘enough moment.’ “

Brooks became so involved in anti-police violence organizing that when she sent her then-4-year-old daughter to stay with her mother in Las Vegas, the girl refused to wear the “Oscar Grant” shirt Brooks had packed for her.

Brooks eased up her schedule a bit after that, but she was right back at it helping organize protests in 2013 after the Trayvon Martin verdict and again last year after grand juries declined to prosecute police in the killings of black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City.

Brooks, an admirer of the Black Panthers, hopes that the protests result in more police accountability and more spending on social programs instead of cops. Down the line, she envisions the emergence of self-empowered communities without police or capitalism — a system that she says pits police against black people and black people against one another.

She knows that utopian view is not in the cards anytime soon, but Brooks said she sees a lot of young comrades, now even including her daughter, getting ready to take up the fight.

“What’s exciting now is there is young black leadership coming up,” she said. “I’m looking forward to very soon passing the mantle and finding another way to serve my folks.”

In addition to evacuating 10 neighboring homes, deputies restricted pedestrian and vehicle traffic in the area while the sheriff's office bomb squad "safely disposed" of the explosives, officials said.